


And They Were Roommates (Oh My God They Were Roommates)

by spookyleo



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Bi Clint Barton, Canon Disabled Character, Dancing, Deaf Clint Barton, Disabled Bucky Barnes, Fluff, Gay Bucky Barnes, M/M, Morning Cuddles, Music in the Evening, POV First Person, PTSD, Trans Steve Rogers, baby photos, discussion of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21994759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyleo/pseuds/spookyleo
Summary: In the morning, I will wake up and stretch and gaze at the lids of his eyes, watch his lashes flutter open and smile. I will kiss the freckles on his belly and lay my head there and feel the way his diaphragm moves when he speaks, the way the low tone of his voice vibrates soundlessly through my broken ear drums. I will not have to read his lips, because I know that he will be confessing his love again through three simple words. Good Morning, Clint.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26
Collections: Winterhawk Wonderland





	And They Were Roommates (Oh My God They Were Roommates)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Coal_burningbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coal_burningbright/gifts).



> Hi guys! Happy Holidays!   
> This is my Winterhawk Wonderland entree for Gray (aka genderfluid-and-confuzled on tumblr.)  
> Their prompts were:  
> Cuddles in the Morning  
> Music in the Evening  
> Baby Photos  
> I decided to go wild and use all three!  
> Huge thanks as always to my internet husband, Kaine, for beta reading. You can follow Kaine on his tumblr, goldblumed.   
> Enjoy!

In the morning, I will wake up and stretch and gaze at the lids of his eyes, watch his lashes flutter open and smile. I will kiss the freckles on his belly and lay my head there and feel the way his diaphragm moves when he speaks, the way the low tone of his voice vibrates soundlessly through my broken ear drums. I will not have to read his lips, because I know that he will be confessing his love again through three simple words. Good Morning, Clint.

Tonight, though, we will dance as if no one is watching. I hear every beat of the music and it echoes like the drum of my heart.

We moved in together out of convenience, originally, me and Buck. Plenty of missions together meant we were acquainted with each other’s company, and Steve Rogers kept Facebook messaging me about how lonely Bucky must be. It made sense, financially, emotionally, so I let my rent run out and ended up on Bucky’s olive-green corduroy sofa.

I always thought it was funny after that – like that vine – you know the one – like “They were roommates” - because one day I was sleeping on his couch and drinking the coffee he kept in the apartment straight from the pot, and the next day I was sleeping in his bed with him and he was licking the taste of that coffee from my mouth.

It’s never going to be the most conventional of relationships when one or both parties wake up screaming most nights. But we’re there for each other, a hand on a shoulder or a tight hug or a fetched glass of water, and it feels good. It feels good to feel cared for, and Bucky tells me he feels the same.

So, each night is a new nightmare. We’ve had our fair share of mornings where we wordlessly watch the sunrise together, or I talk his ear off and get to hear what he thinks or gain a fraction of an insight into how his mind works. With every sentence he speaks to me I fall more in love. It’s difficult for him to elaborate on things, often.

He told me that one morning over coffee. I nodded. I knew already.

“Hey, Clint,” He said over the phone one lunchtime. We’d been living together (dating, if you must) for about four months. I was finishing up at a cafe with Nat. I trusted him to care for Lucky (and vice versa).

“Tomorrow evening, if you’re free,” (I’m always free), “Do you want to. Uh. Talk?”

“Sure thing, Buck. What about?”

Well, I’d find out. He wanted to open the conversation about our pasts.

“I think that I’m ready,” Bucky said, and his voice was unwavering as he spoke.

So, we sat down together. I had suggested we start from the beginning, each of us, because I knew that Bucky had gotten some old pictures of himself from Peggy a few weeks before, and well, I didn’t want to miss out on that opportunity. Nor did I want Bucky to feel unsafe, and the comfort of his childhood may put him at ease for the conversation.

“By the way,” I told him, “If you need to stop talking or you need me to stop talking, at any point, for any reason, please just let me know.”

Buck nodded in response. “You can trust me on that,” He said, because he knew how I fretted about people not telling me about things that don’t make them happy.

And I did. I trusted him.

He started to brew a pot of coffee, and I turned to him from where I was putting a vinyl in the record player.

“We might need something a little stronger,” I said, and the corners of his mouth met with his cheeks. He sat down, and I went to the cupboard and fetched a bottle of red wine and poured some into two glasses, even though I know I cry easy when I drink red wine. Old-timey music started playing from the speakers, one of the records Bucky had found in a dollar bin at a thrift store.

“When I first bought this album, it set me back thirty-five cents,” Bucky said as I sat down. “It’s crazy how it’s managed to go up in price since then.”

I went first. I showed Bucky the photos of me in the circus when I was tiny – I couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen when I first joined. I told him about my father, showed him the cigarette burns on my forearms and the scar on the back of my neck from where he hit me with a bottle, told Bucky about how my dad’s beating had been the thing that made me deaf, about how after that I’d run away. I told Bucky about Barney and about the clowns at the circus, and the time I fell off the tightrope and broke my leg and the only response I got was drunken jeers.

“I can’t believe you used to have a bowl cut,” Bucky said, and I snatched the photo away.

“This is _not_ a bowl cut,” I said, running my finger over the creases of the image. It was yellowed, and that added to the nervous, bashful expression on my face. Barney had his arm around my shoulder, grinning with his eyes tightly shut together. I remember the day it was taken, how he stank of booze. I remembered how much Barney used to remind me of our father.

“He was all I had,” I said, and Bucky smiled weakly.

“You have me now.”

Bucky went next, and I poured us both a second glass of wine, turned the record over. The songs on this side seemed to go a little slower.

The pictures he took out to show me were creased and greyed, almost perfectly straightened out again as if someone had taken an iron to them like an old newspaper.

In the first photo, he couldn’t have been older than eight. It was a school photo, I think, from the smart tie and collar and jumper. He had the same short dark hair – spikier now than it was in the photo – and the same slight cleft in his chin, but nothing else of the photo looked one bit like the man sat at the table with me. I took another sip of wine, felt my heart sink a little. A bright, mischievous grin stretched over the face of the little boy in the photo, and the eyes of the kid sparkled like little gemstones.

I looked at Bucky then, and his eyes swirled more like a storm than a diamond.

“My family was Irish Catholic,” Buck said, slowly, like he wasn’t sure what else to say. “They raised me good – I was in the Boy Scouts and everything.”

“As if,” I said, because I’d heard Steve’s side of this story before. “I heard from Steve you got chucked out after a week?”

He smiled at that, and it was a real smile, and my gut dropped at how happy that made me. It wasn’t like it was the first time I’d seen that smile, but it got me every time. An honour better than anything SHIELD could award.

“I first met Steve before he knew he was a fella,” Buck said, and I knew that too. “He had pigtails and everything. And after he came out, started living as he does, we joined the scouts.”

“They found out that Steve was trans, right?” I said, and Bucky nodded.

“Kicked us out. What a bunch of pricks. Me and Steve may or may not have slashed a few tires in response. And tires weren’t cheap back in the day.”

He showed me another photo, of him just after enlisting.

“I felt so smart in my uniform,” he said, and I stared at it. The photo was in black and white, but it felt like it could come to life in front of me.

“You look so happy,” I said, and I ran one of my fingers over his face in the photo.

“Innocent, more like,” Bucky said, and I nodded.

“War bad,” I said, and Bucky scoffed.

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

He told me the bit that everyone knows, about Hydra and the torture that he doesn’t remember other than flashes of pain, and the bit where Steve charged in all on his own all big and wearing a dumb outfit.

“As far as T shots go, it’s not a bad way to go, right?” I said, and he laughed, and I saw the red of the wine on his tongue and the pain of memory in his eye.

“Next thing I knew, I was falling,” Buck said, and he described the cold in words I can’t even think about. I put one hand over his on the table, rubbed with my fingers as if to get him warm.

“I remember flashes of the next few decades,” He told me. “But mostly pain, and –“ He stuttered. “-And hurting other people.”

I’d seen the scars on his body a hundred times, but I’d never really heard the stories. He told me the one about the scar on his right hand, the one I was rubbing warmth into, about how it had come from where he’d punched through a car window to kill a man.

“An innocent man,” Bucky said, and shook his head.

“That wasn’t you,” I remind him. “It was Hydra,” and he nods, he knows. They used his body.

“I have to look at this hand every day.” He said, and looked up at me, as if asking for forgiveness, as if I wouldn’t give him anything he could ever want if I could. As if I wouldn’t move the earth for him if I could.

“Your body is your own now,” I told him. “You can make what you will of it.”

He stayed silent, looked down at the table. I went to finish the last of my glass of wine, then decided against it.

“Day to day, what can I do to help?” I asked, and his brow furrowed in melancholy surprise. I’ve never been the best at reading expressions – or rooms or much else for that matter – but I could safely say that right then he was feeling that warmth of feeling cared about. And I may not have been through the same things he had, but I understood that feeling well enough, because he provides it for me every day.

“Oh,” He said, limply. “You know trauma. Every day is a new day.” I nodded.

“A new day to be alive. A new day to be loved.”

Bucky took a deep breath, like he’d been holding in his next sentence for a while.

“You being here is more than I could’ve ever asked for,” He said, and I wasn’t sure how to reply.

“Dance with me,” I told him, and I stood up and my knees felt weak.

“You’re wine drunk,” he said, and his hands were big, one warm and other cool on my back, and I swear his eyes looked clearer than they did before. The song wasn’t really right, and dancing is always weird because Bucky is shorter than me, but it felt good in that moment. It felt perfect.

In the morning, I will wake up and stretch and gaze at the lids of his eyes, watch his lashes flutter open and smile. I will kiss the freckles on his belly and lay my head there and feel the way his diaphragm moves when he speaks, the way the low tone of his voice vibrates soundlessly through my broken ear drums. I will not have to read his lips, because I know that he will be confessing his love again through three simple words. Good Morning, Clint.

Tonight, though, we will dance as if no one is watching. I hear every beat of the music and it echoes like the drum of my heart.

**Author's Note:**

> As always I love to hear feedback! Comments are the currency of writing.  
> Happy holidays!


End file.
